Honeybees Check In at Local Hotels

Portland's Provenance hotels are all abuzz about their newest guests (and their sweet, sweet luggage).

Looking to "bee" sustainable on the fly? Check into any PDX Provenance Hotel—the Hotel Lucia, Hotel deLuxe, and Sentinel—and know Bee Local’s bees are enjoying their stay as well. In April, Bee Local honey owner Damian Magista installed bee hives on the three hotel rooftops, and the hotels are now offering sustainably harvested honey from their rooftop urban bees in-room and in their restaurants.

The “sky hives” represent an effort to create sustainable urban bee colonies and produce honey with a truly local flavor. The hotels will feature Magista’s honey in several dishes and cocktails, including Chef Vitaly Paley’s succulent fried rabbit dish at Hotel Lucia’s Imperial, and the Local Honey cocktail at Hotel DeLuxe’s Driftwood Room, which features aria gin, farigoule wild thyme liqueur, Bee Local honey and fresh lemon juice.

Pictured above, Magista and his assistant Ryan LeBrun transfer honeybees into Bee Local’s Langstroth-style hives. Using the calming effects of a smoker, Magista and LeBrun can handle frames full of bees during the careful transfer into their new hotel home. Along with plentiful local forage and top-notch care, the bees also get a pretty sweet view.

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